iPhone 5 or earlier Use iCloud to free space temporarily

[Marknullaby21]

Hi guys, I have an iPhone 4 with 32 GB and just received my new 7+. I want to only transfer Whatsapp to the new phone, and leave all the photos, videos, voice notes and all other stuff in the 4 because it still works. Can I transfer some big videos to iCloud for a moment so I can do a Whatsapp Chat backup? I need one more GB of free space since the phone only has 1.1 free GB, Whatsapp needs 2.1 to do the backup. Any advices?
Thanks in advance, Mark

 

[Stewie]

Nope. That isn’t how iCloud works. It is a copy of what is on your phone and your phone is a copy of what is in iCloud. So if you copy it to iCloud it is still on your phone. If you delete it from your phone it is deleted from iCloud.

 

[now i see it]

Your iPhone 4 can't run iOS 11 so your new iPhone 7 can't restore from its backup to get its Whatsapp data. If Whatsapp can create backups (I've never used it) and import backups, then yes, you can move big files off your iPhone 4 to - iCloud Drive - to free up space, then backup WA to wherever Whatsapp backs up.

Then on the iPhone 7 you could import that backup from whatever service it was backed up to. As I said, I don't know if Whatsapp can do this.

But in a nutshell, you can always use iCloud Drive as an offline storage area. That's what it's there for.

 

[C DM]

Your iPhone 4 can't run iOS 11 so your new iPhone 7 can't restore from its backup to get its Whatsapp data. If Whatsapp can create backups (I've never used it) and import backups, then yes, you can move big files off your iPhone 4 to - iCloud Drive - to free up space, then backup WA to wherever Whatsapp backs up.

Then on the iPhone 7 you could import that backup from whatever service it was backed up to. As I said, I don't know if Whatsapp can do this.

But in a nutshell, you can always use iCloud Drive as an offline storage area. That's what it's there for.

You should be able to restore from an iPhone 4 backup if you wanted to. It seems like that's not what the OP wants (as in restoring from a full backup), so I guess that's kind of moot.

 

[960design]

Hi guys, I have an iPhone 4 with 32 GB and just received my new 7+. I want to only transfer Whatsapp to the new phone, and leave all the photos, videos, voice notes and all other stuff in the 4 because it still works. Can I transfer some big videos to iCloud for a moment so I can do a Whatsapp Chat backup? I need one more GB of free space since the phone only has 1.1 free GB, Whatsapp needs 2.1 to do the backup. Any advices?
Thanks in advance, Mark

Please forgive my ignorance with Whatsapp.
Just try logging into your iPhone7. Download Whatsapp. All of your content should appear. I cannot imagine an app as popular as Whatsapp written in such a way that the content is only on your phone. In my little developer mind, I would have microservice calls to a backend and your iPhone would only display what is available with your account access. In other words, if you logged in using a computer, you still see the same contacts and chats. If you log in with a different phone same content should still be there.

 

[C DM]

Please forgive my ignorance with Whatsapp.
Just try logging into your iPhone7. Download Whatsapp. All of your content should appear. I cannot imagine an app as popular as Whatsapp written in such a way that the content is only on your phone. In my little developer mind, I would have microservice calls to a backend and your iPhone would only display what is available with your account access. In other words, if you logged in using a computer, you still see the same contacts and chats. If you log in with a different phone same content should still be there.

That's assuming content is stored on the server, which isn't always the case, especially with various messengers that can be encrypted and the like.

 

[Marknullaby21]

I think that you can do a backup on an older iOS and then restore it in the same or newer version, if you cant do that I think it would be a headache...

Now, how can I use iCloud Drive on the 4? If I upload some big videos, delete them, do what I want with the free space... then can I be able to re-download the videos and put them back on the photos app? Im wondering since you cant download a video from the internet in iOS like in Android, thats a shame but we have nothing to do about that. Anyone tried or know if you can do this?

 

[now i see it]

Anything (videos, pictures) in the photos app can be uploaded to iCloud Drive. Any photo or video (in the correct format) can be downloaded from iCloud Drive to the photos app. A 2GB movie you've ripped from a DVD though will take a very long time to upload and download.

 

[rui no onna]

You can do a selective iCloud backup (you can choose specific apps you want backed up) then restore the iPhone 7+ from iCloud.

Settings > iCloud > Manage Storage > Backups

That said, assuming you have iCloud Photo Library enabled, photos and videos are typically not included in iCloud device backups anyway. They're stored in the iCloud Photo Library.

If WhatsApp has its own backup mechanism and you're just trying to free up some space in order to use that, what stuff do you actually have stored on the iPhone 4 and where else is that data available? iCloud doesn't really allow much fine-tuning in terms of what you want to store locally and what you want on the cloud. If you have copies of files on a computer or iTunes, then it's easier to just delete and then copy from computer/download from iTunes. Also, try forcing a clean-up of your iPhone's cache. I do that by downloading Hearthstone (3GB game) from the App Store.